There’s no shortage of DS games catering to a wide audience, and Eidos’s latest, Prism: Light the Way is looking to join the select few which carve out a spot atop the casual gaming lists.
The game certainly won’t win any awards for its story. Basically, you have these creatures called the Glowbos, which feed on light. (Which makes it odd they stay in some dark cave-like area, but that’s neither here nor there.) To make sure the Glowbos don’t go extinct, it’s up to you to give them the light they so desperately need; this comes from a friendly race of light-emitting creatures known Bulboids.
How you do so is where Prism shines. (I swear, when I originally wrote that there was no pun intended.) The game is composed of many maps, in which you’re given several Glowbos to feed light to, and a limited supply of Bulboids and other objects such as mirrors and t-splitters to make it happen.
This sounds really easy on paper, and at first it is. In fact, the first chunk of the game is so easy I almost wanted to let my friend’s 4 year-old son play it. Then, however, the game takes an incredibly steep turn in difficulty. Within one mission, the game goes from holding your hand and offering the solutions to every puzzle to having multiple Glowbos of varying colors and several Bulboids, with no out. Suddenly, you’re left alone and it’s almost shocking at how fast it gets hard. It doesn’t help that the ease of the beginning puzzles has made everyone I’ve let try the game go to hitting hint until the puzzle is completed. Maybe there’s a good reason the difficulty gets upped a notch and hints get taken away?
But that’s what makes Prism fun. It’s not going to win any awards for graphics or features (it did start out on mobile, after all) but in terms of puzzle solving and longevity, the game looks like it will be a real winner.
You’ll have the option of completing the normal adventure-like mode, and also an infinite mode which… Well, it’s basically infinite. Random puzzles are created, random creatures placed, etc.
Prism comes out in mid-October, and look for a review in the near future. There’s not a whole lot to tell about the game since it’s such a simple concept, but what I can say is this: if you have a casual or younger/unexperienced gamer with a DS looking for a good title this holiday season, at this point I haven’t played anything that fits the bill better than Prism.
